Another day, another hack. The second largest health insurer in the country has confirmed that it has been hacked. Tens of millions of customer and employee records are said to be have been compromised in this hack. Anthem’s database contains records of over 80 million people and the hackers were apparently able to gain access to this database.
Anthem says that it doesn’t appear that the hackers took financial or medication information of customers and employees, but the health insurer does say that compromised information includes Social Security numbers, names, addresses and birthdays.
Being the second largest health insurer in the country Anthem provides cover to over 37 million people and offers plans in some many states. It isn’t providing an exact number of the records stolen in the hack since the data hasn’t popped up on the black market yet.
It also does not know how hackers were able to break into the database. The hack is said to have been carried out with advanced tools and is described as “sophisticated” by the member of a team that has been brought in by Anthem to investigate the hack.
Other major companies like Target who were also hacked recently came under fire because they didn’t disclose it earlier.
Anthem was quick to make its hack public even though Federal law gives insurance companies 60 days to report cyberattacks once they have been discovered.
Filed in . Read more about Cyberattacks and Hacking. Source: wsj